The problem with Google's Art Project

Google's new art project sounds impressive and looks slick on the surface, but
its execution is frustrating.

At first glance,Google’s new Art Project is a wondrous thing. The Internet colossus is collaborating with 17 heavyweight international museums, including the Met in New York, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, the Uffizi in Florence, and the National Gallery in London, to provide an online simulacrum of the experience of visiting a world-class gallery. Using Google’s “Street View” technology, viewers can take a virtual tour around the museums, and look at high-resolution images of more than 1,060 works of art from their collections.

In addition, each institution has nominated a single piece as a “Gigapixel Artwork”, which Google has photographed “using super high resolution or ‘gigapixel’ photo capturing technology”. This may sound like pseudo-scientific hokum, but apparently it produces an electronic image containing 7 billion pixels, allowing viewers to study the work in microscopic detail. In most, but not all, cases, the artworks chosen for the “Gigapixel” treatment are lodestars of a particular collection – such as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi. The results are undeniably stunning: for instance, the National Gallery’s “Gigapixel Artwork” is Holbein’s Ambassadors; zoom in, and you can make out the craquelure of the oil paint.

So what’s not to like? Don’t get me wrong: I admire Google’s faith in its own ability to further the causes of democracy via technology. Every political bone in my body believes it is wrong that, even today, in 2011, fine art is still so exclusive. Great art must never be the preserve of the powerful and wealthy alone. A masterpiece is universal, and in an ideal world, it should be seen for free. If Google’s free Art Project introduces some of the treasures of these museums to a new audience, then that is a fine thing.

But while I love the idea of the Art Project, its execution is problematic.

For one thing, the project is far from definitive; in truth, as things stand, it is frustratingly partial. Not every celebrated museum in the world is taking part – what about the Prado in Madrid, or the Vatican Museums in Rome? Google offers the illusion that it is casting a net around the greatest works of art in the world. But lots have got away, such as Velazquez’s Las Meninas, or the antique marble Laocoon.

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In addition, Google’s grainy “Street View” photography reminds me of the kind of handheld footage favoured in horror movies such as The Blair Witch Project – a “look” that is surely anathema to the carefully orchestrated clarity of the galleries in reality.

Moreover, at the moment only a small proportion of works from each collection is available in high-resolution. One of the pleasures of exploring a museum is that you can follow your eyes, and linger in front of any work of art that takes your fancy. This is impossible with Google’s Art Project since it prescribes which images you are allowed to study in any depth. Their selection from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for instance, favours Neo- and Post-Impressionist painting by the likes of Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne, at the expense of modernist masterpieces.

In other words, someone else is deciding what images are worthy of study on your behalf – an impulse that surely runs counter to the “democratic” motivation of the project in the first place. Essentially, Google’s Art Project is a cherry-picking tool, but I would much rather choose the cherries I want to pick myself.

As for the choice of the “Gigapixel Artworks”, supposedly the stars of each collection, sometimes the selection is perverse. The Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid opts for a Cubist composition by Juan Gris instead of Picasso’s Guernica, which, for many people, is the only reason they actually visit the museum in the first place (the Art Project does not offer Guernica as a high-res artwork, either). Tate Britain’s “Gigapixel Artwork” is a painting by the contemporary artist Chris Ofili. Is No Woman, No Cry really on a par with other “Gigapixel” paintings, such as Rembrandt’s Night Watch? (Incidentally, Van Gogh and Holbein are both honoured with two “Gigapixel” paintings each, which seems a little unfair on the legions of first-rate artists who have been overlooked.)

Google might respond that, over time, they hope to redress the balance, and that they dream of a day when every single work of art in every single museum around the world will be photographed in “super high resolution”. Fine, but the worrying implication of their Art Project is that in the future there will no longer be any need to visit a museum. According to Google’s own press release, an image containing around 7 billion pixels allows the viewer “to study details of the brushwork and patina beyond that possible with the naked eye [sic]”. If Google’s technology trumps the powers of the naked eye, then why bother with reality at all? What can be gleaned from looking at Holbein’s Ambassadors on a trip to the National Gallery that cannot be enhanced by looking at a simulacrum of it on Google’s Art Project?

This is a profound philosophical problem, but my instinct is that I would much prefer to visit the National Gallery to see Holbein’s Ambassadors with my own eyes than to examine it through Google’s “super-high-resolution” prism. Every time. Google’s Art Project is a wonderful resource, but it is no substitute for the experiencing of looking at art for real.